112 THE WHALE HUNTERS 



eSpied the letters on the white-painted bows: Meribah 

 Nantucket. 



On the poop-deck of the whaler a young, fair-haired 

 man of twenty watched the merchantman as she passed 

 and then returned below to the officers' space in the stern 

 where on his bunk lay several old and tattered leather- 

 bound volumes. They had been given to him by his 

 mother who had discovered them in an old bureau in the 

 house of the Oakleys at Nantucket, and she had expressed 

 the hope that this old journal would provide her son with 

 a means of passing away in a pleasant manner a few of 

 the many thousands of hours of tedium that must be 

 endured during a four-year voyage in search of sperm 

 whale in the Pacific. 



He sat on the bunk and as he turned the age-soiled 

 pages of neatly written script he was in his imagination 

 no longer Thomas Oakley, third mate of the Yankee 

 whaler Meribah, but Jonathan Oakley, promoted to first 

 mate of a hundred-ton whaling brig sailing in search of 

 bowheads in the northern waters that had been opened to 

 the fleet of New England whalers by the bold but ill-fated 

 little Pilgrim, 



Thomas had already read during the run down from the 

 Cape Verde Islands of how his ancestor had watched as a 

 boy the longshore whalemen on the Nantucket beaches; 

 of how, after the wreck of the Pilgrim and the passage to 

 England, he had returned with Joseph and Chimoo to be 

 greeted by the Mathers in old Nantucket; and of the lad's 

 frequent voyages into the Atlantic in search not only of 

 right whales but also of sperm whales which abounded in 

 the warmer southern waters. He read of Jonathan's 

 pride at striking his first whale which entitled him to 

 wear a toggle badge in his buttonhole; of Jonathan as a 

 fully fledged harpooner, schooled by the faithful Chimoo. 



As the Meribah reached for the Roaring Forties and the 

 remote island of Tristan da Cunha Thomas found himself 



